How to correctly save the clinical information of TCGA

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How to save TCGA clinical information in correct format to avoid misalignment and misalignment?

The clinical data of TCGA need to be saved to a file after being downloaded by TCGAbiolinks. Generally, we all hope that the saved file can be opened by excel.

But there are several problems in clinical data:

1. Some values are missing and there is no value filling.

2, there are spaces, commas and so on in some fields

If you directly use write.table in R to read and write, there will often be wrong rows of data and wrong columns of fields. The main reason is that the function defaults to tab format: "\ t" for data segmentation, while excel cannot distinguish between spaces and tab.

This requires the use of a separator that does not exist in clinical information to segment the data, for example, using an asterisk (*) to segment.

# Save the data to the file clinical_file